What is "piranha"

also pirana, 1869, from Portuguese piranha, from Tupi (Brazil) pira nya, variant of pira'ya, literally "scissors."

n. Any of the carnivorous freshwater fish living in South American rivers and belonging to the subfamily ''(taxlink Serrasalminae subfamily noshow=1)''.

1. n. someone who attacks in search of booty [syn: marauder, predator, vulture]

2. small voraciously carnivorous freshwater fishes of South America that attack and destroy living animals [syn: pirana, caribe]

A piranha or piraña (, , or ; , ) is a member of family Characidae

in order Characiformes, an omnivorous freshwater fish that inhabits South American rivers. In Venezuela, they are called caribes. They are known for their sharp teeth and powerful jaws.

Piranha is a 1978 American satirical B horror film directed and co-edited by Joe Dante, and starring Bradford Dillman, Heather Menzies, Kevin McCarthy, Keenan Wynn, Barbara Steele, and Dick Miller. Set at a summer resort river, the film concerns the resort's partygoers being under attack and devoured by genetically-altered piranhas which were accidentally released into the river. Produced by Roger Corman, Piranha is a parody of the 1975 film Jaws, which had been a major success for distributor Universal Studios and director Steven Spielberg, and inspired a series of similarly themed B movies such as Grizzly and Orca.

Initially, Universal Studios had considered an injunction because of the film's satirizing, but the lawsuit was cancelled and allowed to continue the film for its release date after Steven Spielberg's gave a positive thought for the film in advance. Released on August 3, 1978, the film was a critical and commercial success and has later achieved as a cult film. Piranha was followed by a sequel, Piranha II: The Spawning, in 1981, and two remakes, one in 1995, and another in 2010, which spawned its own sequel in 2012.

Piranha or Piraña, an omnivorous freshwater fish

It may also refer to:

People

• Pirana, pseudonym of Belgian cartoonist and comics artist Leon van de Velde.

Tribes

• Pirahã people, an Amazonian tribe

Companies

• Piranha Interactive Publishing, an American software publisher
• Piranha Bytes, a German game developer
• Piranha Games, a Canadian software developer
• Piranha Games (Macmillan), a defunct software label of MacMillan Publishing

Fiction

• Piranha (or Piranha Advancements) is a drivable combat ship in the Wipeout series
• Piranha (comics), a fictional character from Marvel Comics

Media

• Piranha (1978 film), a 1978 horror film
  • Piranha II: The Spawning, 1981 sequel to the 1978 film
  • Piranha (1995 film), 1995 remake of the 1978 film
  • Piranha 3D, 2010 remake of the 1978 film
  • Piranha 3DD, 2012 sequel to the 2010 film
• Piranha (1972 film), a horror movie unrelated to the film series
• The Piranha (newspaper), Trinity College, Dublin's student satirical newspaper
• Piranha Press, an imprint of DC comics (1989 to 1993)
• Piranha (album), a 2000 album by the Fullerton College Jazz Band
• "Piranha" (song), a song by The Grace
• "Piranha", a song by The Prodigy from the album Invaders Must Die
• "Piranha", a song by rock band Tripping Daisy
• "Piranha", a song by metal band Exodus
• Petey Piranha, a character in the Mario game series
• Piranha Plant, an enemy in Nintendo's Super Mario video games
• Piranha Brothers, a Monty Python sketch
• Piranha Club, a powerful and eponymous fraternity in the comic strip Ernie/Piranha Club
• The Piranhas, a ska-influenced punk band from Brighton

Vehicles

• Bertone Pirana, a show car based on the Jaguar E-type

' Military'

• Mectron MAA-1 Piranha, Air-Air Missile
• MOWAG Piranha, a type of armoured fighting vehicle
• USS Piranha (SS-389), a Balao-class submarine

Miscellaneous

• Piranhas (baseball), a nickname for some of the hitters on the Minnesota Twins baseball team
• Piranha (software), a data mining system
• Piranha solution, a cleaning solution

Piranha, also known as Piranhas, is a 1995 American horror television film directed by Scott P. Levy about a school of killer piranha descending upon the bustling Lost River Lake Resort. Produced by Roger Corman for the Showtime network, the film is a remake of the 1978 film Piranha, directed by Joe Dante and is also Mila Kunis' debut role.

Piranha Film series is an horror comedy franchise, and a parody of the 1975 film Jaws.

Piranha is a fictional character in the Marvel Universe.

"Piranha" is The Grace's 5th Japanese single under the Rhythm Zone label and was released in both CD and CD+DVD (Limited Edition) versions. "Piranha" was released almost a year after the last single "Juicy Love". In this single, "My Everything", translated version from 3rd Korean single 열정 (My Everything), Just for One Day, translated version from 1st Korean album Hanbeon Deo, OK?, and a remix of the single " The Club" is all included in this maxi single. It ranked #50 on the Oricon charts and charted for two weeks, selling 2,920 copies in Japan.

Piranha is a CD released by the Fullerton College Jazz Band and Alternative Jazz Lab Ensemble in 2000, it was critically acclaimed by All About Jazz.

Piranha is a text mining system developed for the United States Department of Energy (DOE) by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The software processes large volumes of unrelated free-text documents and shows relationships amongst them, a technique valuable across numerous scientific and data domains, from health care fraud to national security. The results are presented in clusters of prioritized relevance to business and government analysts. Piranha uses the term frequency/inverse corpus frequency term weighting method which provides strong parallel processing of textual information, thus the ability to analyze very large document sets. Piranha has six main strengths: Collecting and Extracting: Millions of documents from numerous sources such as databases and social media can be collected and text extracted from hundreds of file formats; This info. can then be translated to any number of languages. Storing and indexing: Documents in search servers, relational databases, etc. can be stored and indexed at will. Recommending: Recommending the most valuable information for particular users. Categorizing: Grouping items via supervised and semi-supervised machine learning methods and targeted search lists. Clustering: Similarity is used to create a hierarchical group of documents. Visualizing: Showing relationships among documents so that users can quickly recognize connections.

This work has resulted in eight issued ( 9,256,649, 8,825,710, 8,473,314, 7,937,389, 7,805,446, 7,693,9037, 7,315,858, 7,072,883), and several commercial licenses (including TextOre and Pro2Serve), a spin-off company with the inventors, Covenant Health, and Pro2Serve called VortexT Analytics, two R&D 100 Awards, and scores of peer reviewed research publications.

Piranha is a digital imaging application produced by Interactive Effects, Inc. Its features include editing, compositing, conforming, color grading, 2D and 3D paint, and titling. Piranha has been used to produce imagery for feature films, TV shows, and electronic entertainment titles since its debut in the mid-1990s.